Pharrell Williams is beyond happy. The artist and businessman is striding between recording and mixing rooms at a studio in Paris at 1.03am. One moment he’s recording a verse for his upcoming song, hitting a high note that most prepubescent boys would struggle to reach; the next, he’s in the adjacent room with rapper Kid Cudi, debating the merits of one song versus another and composing runs on a keyboard. The temperature in the studio is not much warmer than the Parisian winter outside, there is an entourage of half a dozen individuals around the singer, tapping away on laptops or aiming cameras and smartphones in his direction, but his whole world at the moment is just a one-metre radius from the keyboard. This is Pharrell in the throes of pure creation.
“I’m just a guy who likes to make things,” says the man who was just confirmed as Louis Vuitton’s new men’s creative director, taking over the role from the late and great Virgil Abloh. The brand’s new chairman and CEO, Pietro Beccari,
